THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF GOD IN JUSTIFICATION

iii. 21-26: STATEMENT OF THE DOCTRINE OF JUSTIFICATION

In verses 21-22, we have a full and careful re-statement of the thesis of i. 17. God's righteousness, he said there, is revealed in the Gospel by faith and for faith. More precisely, he now says, we have a righteousness of God disclosed apart from . . .

21 . . . law altogether : it is a righteousness of God which comes by . . .

22 . . . believing in Jesus Christ ; and it is meant for all who have faith. The new revelation of God's righteousness is apart from law, in so far as the Law is a code of commands (Eph. ii. 15) – that is, it is in no sense a mere development of the legalistic Judaism in which Paul had been brought up. But, on the other hand, it was not unrelated to the Law in its wider sense, as God's self-revelation of Himself in the Old Testament ; for it is attested by the Law and the prophets. It is because Paul believed this that he so constantly appeals to the Old Testament for confirmation of his teaching.

This has been thought to be inconsistent with his position that Christ is an end to law (Rom. x. 4). But Paul divined, what modern criticism of the Old Testament has clearly proved, that legalistic Judaism was after all a one-sided development of the religion of the Old Testament. In the prophets, in the Psalms, and even embedded in the Pentateuch itself, there is a conception of God in His relation to men which goes far beyond the merely legal conceptions of orthodox Judaism in Paul's time, and is in the most real sense the direct antecedent of Christianity. Paul's citation of Old Testament passages often strikes us as arbitrary, and his interpretation of them as fanciful, but at bottom what he is doing is to appeal to the prophetic strain in biblical religion against the legal strain which prevailed in the Judaism of his' own time. Jesus Himself had insisted on the continuity of His own work with that of the prophets, and had deliberately set the prophetic conception of religion over against the Pharisaic, and in this Paul followed him., In the second century, Marcion, believing himself to be interpreting Paul, called upon the Church to abandon the Old Testament, and he has many followers to-day. But the Church rightly refused Marcion's way, in spite of his religious fervour and moral earnestness.
We proceed, then, with Paul's carefully considered statement. The righteousness of God is meant for all who have faith ; no distinctions are drawn. He has risen above the level of the questions that embarrassed him in iii. 1-8, and takes his stand on a clear principle. With the discussions of i:18-ii:29 in view, he can sum up the condition of mankind in the words . . .

23
All have sinned ; all come short of the glory of God. The latter clause may be taken as a definition of sin. Man was created to bear the likeness of God ; ideally he is 'the image and glory of God ' (i Cor. xi. 7. I do not understand Moffatt's translation there). This gives us the clue to the meaning of the present passage. The glory of God is the divine likeness which man is intended to bear. In so far as man departs from the likeness of God he is sinful. To come short of the glory of God is to sin. This definition, simple, broad, and profound, should be borne in mind whenever Paul has occasion to speak about sin. (See, further, notes on v. 12-14.)

24, 25
The following clauses describe what God does for men who'4are in this sinful condition. They are so important, and so precisely formulated, that it will be well to supply something like a glossary of the terms used.

First, the terms righteous, just ; righteousness, justice justify ; all represent Greek words from one single root. In rendering them into English we are embarrassed by the fact that there is no English verb corresponding to the adjective righteous, while, on the other hand, the adjective just, corresponding to the verb justify is a much less adequate translation of the Greek adjective than righteous. The Greek word translated justify means in Greek writers 'to account or pronounce right,' or 'to treat justly.' (It does not mean, 'to make righteous.') In the former sense it may be rendered, 'to acquit,' and Dr. Moffatt has, in fact, rendered it so in iii. 20. That is the surface meaning, so to speak, of the word as used by Paul. Sinful men before the divine tribunal are acquitted, for nothing, by God's decree as judge. They need do nothing to secure their acquittal, for it is not on the ground of any merit, but by His grace ; grace being the free, even arbitrary, favour of a sovereign.

But, to get the flavour of the word justify as used by Paul, we must have in mind the language of the Hebrew Bible with which he was familiar. I have dealt above with the meaning of 'righteousness ' for the Hebrews (note on i. 17). Justification is for them an act by which a wronged person is given his rights, is vindicated, delivered from oppression. When the Second Isaiah looks forward to the coming of the righteousness of Jehovah, he thinks of it in terms of the 'justification’ of His people, i.e. their deliverance from the power of evil under which they are oppressed. This Hebrew background colours the Greek terms. Paul uses them in a way which hovers between their wider Hebrew and their narrower Greek connotation. When he says, they are justified for nothing by His grace, the idea uppermost in his mind is that of deliverance. But as he is stating it in legal, forensic terms, deliverance takes the form of an acquittal in court.

To say that guilty men are acquitted before the divine tribunal is sheer paradox. Paul meant it to be so. If the dealing of God with sinful men is to be described in legal terms at all (as Paul and his fellow-Pharisees were accustomed to describe it), then it can be described only in terms of paradox. For the fact is that, though men have deserved ill of God, He does not give them their deserts ; though they have merited His hatred, He gives them His love; He is 'kind toward the unthankful and evil.' Jesus could describe it in these purely personal terms; He was living it out in His own personal relationships, as the 'friend of publicans and sinners.' But if it has to be put in terms of the law-court, how can you put it except by saying that God acquits the guilty – a thing monstrous at law ? We may note that in the Old Testament the very phrase, 'to justify the wicked,' is constantly used of unjust judges (e.g. Isa. v.:23 ; Prov. xvii. 15 ; Exod. xxiii. 7). Paul therefore was fully aware what a daring thing he was doing in attributing such a thing to God. The real moral is that the personal relations of God to men cannot be described in legal terms at all. The revelation of His righteousness is apart from law altogether.

But meanwhile there is a value in the paradox. Paul is addressing people to whom, as to himself, it came natural to think of religion in terms of law, and a challenging paradox was the best way of making his point. Further, the metaphor of the law-court gave him the opportunity of emphasizing the sovereignty of God. When the prisoner at the bar has no case, all he can do is to throw himself on the mercy of the court. In this court the Judge is one whose will is law: if He acquits the prisoner, then he leaves the court without a stain on his character. It is all the doing of the God who has reconciled me to Himself . . . for in Christ God reconciled the world to Himself instead of counting men's trespasses against them (2 Cor. v. 18-19). But again, this forensic way of thinking in religion is not the arbitrary invention of the Pharisees ; it is natural to all whose religion is strongly ethical. Conscience itself is a tribunal (cf. ii. 16) and we naturally speak of conscience 'accusing' and 'condemning' us. Now when, as in all ethical religions, the awed feeling of reverence which is the typically religious feeling is directed towards God as the supreme Right personified, the condemnation of conscience inevitably produces the sense of guilt before God, which hinders communion with Him. Paul meets this universally familiar experience with the startling statement that God acquits the guilty. If we can accept this, we are able to confront our moral task free of the crippling disability of a guilty conscience. It is a matter of common experience among men that a wrongdoer can best be helped to better ways if someone can be found for whose opinion he has the highest respect, and who will treat him, not as the hopeless wastrel he may have been, but as the decent citizen he has it in him to become. This was how Jesus treated the publicans and sinners (see especially Luke xix. 1-10). If a sinner can believe that God treats him in that way, his battle against sin is half won. This is the psychological value of Paul's doctrine of justification.

The next of Paul's leading terms which needs definition is ransom. The Greek word used here is commonly used in writers and inscriptions of the period with reference to the liberation of slaves or prisoners of war. This was frequently effected by the payment of a sum of money as ransom. But Paul's term (apolytrosis) is not concrete, as the English word ransom suggests, but abstract (= the act of redeeming). Further, it can be used without any explicit reference to the payment of money, as a simple equivalent of 'emancipation' (apeleutherosis – as, for instance, in an inscription published in Hicks and Hill's Inscriptions of Cos, No. 29). This is the basis of Paul's usage. But once again the particular colour is given by the Old Testament associations of the word. When the children of Israel were liberated from bondage in Egypt, they were regarded as slaves 'redeemed ' by Jehovah (e.g. Deut. vii. 8) ; and the later prophets similarly spoke of the liberation from captivity in Babylon as 'redemption ' (e.g. Isa. li. 11). We learn from Gal. iii. 23-iv. 5 that Paul could conceive the work of Christ as being the emancipation of the people of God from bondage – a parallel on a higher level to the redemption of Israel from Egypt and from Babylon. This is the thought in the present passage. Our justification depends upon the fact that God has intervened to emancipate His people from bondage to sin. Those who by faith in Him through Christ accept a place among His people are justified.

Thirdly, we have the term propitiation. The Greek word (hilasterion) is derived from a verb which in pagan writers and inscriptions has two meanings: (a) 'to placate' a man or a god ; (b) 'to expiate' a sin, i.e. to perform an act (such as the payment of a fine or the offering of a sacrifice) by which its guilt is annulled. The former meaning is overwhelmingly the more common. In the Septuagint, on the other hand, the meaning (a) is practically unknown where God is the object, and the meaning (b) is found in scores of passages. Thus the biblical sense of the verb is 'to perform an act whereby guilt or defilement is removed.' The idea underlying it is characteristic of primitive religion. The ancients felt that if a taboo was infringed, the person or thing involved became unclean, defiled or profane. The condition of defilement might be removed by the performance of the appropriate act: it might be washing with water, or sprinkling with blood, or simply the forfeiture of some valuable object to the deity concerned with the taboo. Such acts were felt to have the value, so to speak, of a disinfectant. Thus in the Old Testament a whole range of ritual actions are prescribed for disinfecting the priest, the altar, or the people from various forms of defilement, ritual or moral. Our versions in such cases use the phrase 'to make propitiation' ; but the more proper translation would be 'to make expiation.' This meaning holds good wherever the subject of the verb is a man. But, as religious thought advanced, it came to be felt that, where the defilement was moral, God alone could annul it; and so the same verb is used with God as subject in the sense 'to forgive.’

In accordance with biblical usage, therefore, the substantive (hilasterion) would mean, not propitiation, but 'a means by which guilt is annulled' : if a man is the agent, the meaning would be 'a means of expiation' ; if God, 'a means by which sin is forgiven.' Biblical usage is determinative for Paul. The rendering propitiation is therefore misleading, for it suggests the placating of an angry God, and although this would be in accord with pagan usage, it is foreign to biblical usage. In the present passage it is God who puts forward the means whereby the guilt of sin is removed, by sending Christ. The sending of Christ, therefore, is the divine method of forgiveness. This brings the teaching of the present passage into exact harmony with that of v. 8-9.

Fourthly, something must be said here about the use of the word blood, and what is said will apply also to its use in v. 9 and other similar passages. As we have seen, one method for annulling the defilement of sin was the offering of a sacrifice, and particularly the shedding of the blood of a victim. There can be little doubt that when Paul uses the word blood in conjunction with the word for expiation he is thinking in sacrificial terms. The divine method for the forgiveness of sins takes effect through the sacrifice of Christ. But we have still to ask why was value attached to blood in ancient religion ? The answer is given in Gen. ix. 4; Lev. xvii. ii ; Deut. xii. 23 : the blood is the life. Thus, when Paul speaks of the blood of Christ, he is thinking of His life as laid down in self-dedication to God. Thus he can say elsewhere that it is Christ's obedience that effects our salvation (v. 19) : His death is the crown and seal of that obedience, for He humbly stooped in His obedience even to die, and to die on the cross (Phil. ii. 8). The language of sacrifice expresses figuratively a reality which is personal and ethical. Similarly, in speaking of the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper (1 Cor. x. 16), Paul can say, The cup of blessing which we bless, is that not participating in the blood of Christ ? – i.e. participating in His life as dedicated to God (see also Rom. vi. 1-11 and notes there). The sacrificial language is not natural to us [but see xii. i, xv. 16], but to Paul's readers, Jewish and Gentile alike, it was deeply impressive, because associated with some of their most sacred thoughts and experiences.

Finally there is the word faith. This has already been discussed and defined in the notes on i. 17. It describes the attitude of pure receptivity in which the soul appropriates what God has done. Observe that Moffatt's translation removes the ambiguity of our current versions, which makes it possible for the clause 'in His blood' to be connected with 'faith.' But 'faith in His blood' would be an impossible expression for Paul to use. Faith is for him always faith in God through Christ. So here the divine forgiveness, working through the blood, i.e. the consecrated life, of Christ, is to be received by faith, i.e. by an act of sheer trust in God the All-sufficient.

Having now defined our terms, we may proceed to the interpretation of Paul's comprehensive statement. We find that he is combining three metaphors : the first taken from the law-court – the metaphor of justification ; the second taken from the institution of slavery – that of emancipation ; the third taken from the sacrificial ritual of ancient religion – that of expiation by blood. Under all three metaphors he describes an act of God for men. In the first, God takes the part of the judge who acquits the prisoner ; in the second, that of the benefactor who secures freedom for the slave ; in the third, that of the priest who makes expiation. But in Paul's biblical background all these metaphors had already moved part of the way into reality. The deliverance of Israel from bondage had been described by the prophets both as ‘justification' and as 'emancipation' ; and the language of the Septuagint shows that there was already a sense that the only final expiation of sin was the forgiveness granted by God Himself. Thus his own thought was less at the mercy of his metaphors than that of his Greek readers might be, lacking his biblical background. But the metaphors serve in each case to emphasize the pure objectivity of that which God has done for men. Paul is not here concerned, as he will be in the next section (v.-vii.), with the inward effect of all this in the lives of men. He is concerned with their status before God, which is altered by an act of God Himself – from condemnation to acquittal, from bondage to freedom, from guilt to innocence. The change of status described in this threefold way is, as he presently shows, accompanied by an inward change from sinfulness to right living, from moral impotence to moral competence. But what he is here concerned to make clear is that by no possible effort of his own could man alter his status before God, any more than a guilty prisoner could acquit himself, or a slave free himself, or an I unclean 'person become 'clean' without supernatural means ; but that God, by a sheer act of grace, has made this change of status possible.

None of the three metaphors can make the same direct appeal to us that they did to Paul; but perhaps we can arrive through them at the substance of what he is saying. All men, he says, are sinful, for they do not live in that likeness to God for which man is designed. This sets a barrier between us and God. No efforts of ours at self-improvement can make us fit to associate with God, for they cannot get rid of the guilt of our past. Shakespeare has given us a study of a guilty conscience in Lady Macbeth (see Act V., scene i.), and the outstanding feature of it is the sense that evil once committed remains as a permanent element in the personality. 'What, will these hands ne'er be clean ? There's knocking at the gate. What's done cannot be undone. To bed, to bed, to bed!’ For anyone who believes in God as holy and righteous that permanence of guilt means a permanent separation from Him. And yet, on the other hand, our only hope of being better is to come into touch with God, who is the sole source of all goodness. There is therefore an impasse. Only if a man can come to believe that God Himself has passed the barrier of guilt and come to him, can religion help him to become better. Now, what Paul declares as 'the Gospel of God ' is that God has, in fact, not only passed the barrier, but removed it.

The assurance that He has done so he finds in the fact of Christ. He had the story of Jesus before him, even though our Gospels were not yet written, and the facts on which Paul went are there accessible to us. We read there how Jesus dealt with the paralytic (Mark ii. 1-12), the sinful woman (Luke vii. 36-50), the publicans and sinners who crop up all through the Gospels; we read His own parables by which He interpreted and defended His action, especially that of the Prodigal Son (Luke xv. 11-32) ; and we read the Gospel story as a whole, observing how the attack He made upon the barriers which had been set up by the religious against the sinful led directly to His death, so that in this sense (as well as in others) He died for other people's sins. These are the data for Paul's conclusion that God provided for the justification of sinners by means of the self-sacrifice of Christ in life and death. With the Gospels before us, we must either agree with the enemies of Jesus that He suffered justly for an attitude to sin which undermined the foundations of morality ; or we must concede that this way of dealing with sinful men is inherently divine, and an index to God's unchanging attitude to sinners. When a man comes to believe that, and accordingly trusts himself to God as thus conceived, he knows that the sense of guilt with which he has been oppressed does not separate him from God ' and he can make a fresh start with divine assistance. This is not to make justification a merely subjective matter, for everything depends on the concrete fact of the life of Christ, which is objective as any fact of history is objective. It is an act of God in history. Not that anything that Christ did altered the attitude of God towards men. His coming represents the crucial phase of God's self-revealing activity in all history (which Paul traces from the call of Abraham downwards) ; but God always was and always is that which Christ showed Him to be.

25b, 26
The following clauses indicate how this act of justification is related to the righteousness of God. In reading them we must bear in mind that righteous and just are only different English renderings of the same Greek word; and so are righteousness and justice. Dr. Moffatt has chosen here to use just and justice, although in verses 21 and 22 he had used righteousness, presumably because only so could the connection of these words with justify be made clear. But the justice of God in verse 26 is the same thing as the righteousness of God in verses 21-22. Now, we have seen that, according to the prophets who supply the background of Paul's religious thinking, the righteousness of God is shown in the deliverance of His people from the power of evil, in the victory of the good cause in them and through them in the world. Thus in order that God may be revealed as righteous it is necessary that He should be revealed as delivering men from the power of evil, as ' justifying' them in the Old Testament sense of the word. This was, Paul asserts, the purpose and the result of the life and death of Christ, with all that ensued : it was to demonstrate His justice [righteousness] at the present epoch, showing that God is just [righteous] Himself, and that He justifies [vindicates or delivers] man. There is no suggestion that a device has been found by which the justice of God can be satisfied (by the vicarious punishment of sin, for example), while at the same time His mercy is exerted to save the sinner. No such antithesis between justice and mercy was in Paul's mind. The justification of the sinner-his deliverance from the guilt of sin-is the conclusive proof of the righteousness of God. Paul emphasizes the point that this proof has been given at the present epoch. This is a reference to the idea (which I have dealt with on i. 17-18) that with Christ the Age to Come ' begins

Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo.

In the past age there was no such radical dealing with the problem set by the sin of man. Sins previously committed ... had been passed over. This could be understood as a mere matter of forbearance on God's part. The danger of such a conception of God, as forbearing, lenient, indulgent to the sin of His people, has been already touched upon (see ii. 3-4 and notes there). The mere passing-over of sins was, so to speak, a provisional measure, suitable to the age in which God's decisive action was still awaited. Such forbearance could not make any difference to the fact that in due time sin would by the law of cause and effect bring its own retribution – the Wrath. It was no revelation of the 'righteous acts of the Lord.' God's righteousness is revealed if, over against the terrible spectacle of the Wrath at work (as Paul has described it in chap. i.), there is a divine intervention by which man is delivered from sin and wrath. And now that the New Age has dawned, such an intervention has taken place, and it proves finally that God is just, in that He justifies man.

The above exposition of the thought of this passage – a key passage in Paul's teaching – runs very differently, it must be confessed, from the traditional doctrines based upon it : the ransom paid to the devil, the propitiation of the wrath of God, the satisfaction demanded by His justice and afforded by Christ's vicarious endurance of the penalty of sin, and so forth. I have tried to show, by close examination (at some risk of tedium to the reader) of the actual language used by Paul, that no such ideas can be supposed to have been in his mind. Why, then, have they been attributed to him ? There are strong historical reasons why he was misunderstood. To begin with, the classical theologians of the Christian Church, from Origen onwards, were Greeks, with little inward sense for the Hebrew and biblical ideas which formed the atmosphere of Paul's thinking. Later, ideas derived from Roman law prevailed, and gave a false colouring to his language. Further, in the Middle Ages and at the Reformation, when a supposedly Pauline theology was re-framed, ancient ideas of sacrifice were no longer alive, and the language which derived from them was not understood. For these and similar reasons a passage like the present became unintelligible, and current or traditional theological ideas were read into it. In our own day the fresh study of ancient thought and language, both Hebrew and Greek, has placed new instruments in the hands of the interpreter of Paul, and we can approach him with some better prospect of coming in touch with his mind. But while we reject some of the historic statements of Pauline theology, we must admit that they were not untrue to his intention, insofar as they enabled men to believe reasonably, in terms of the thought of their time, that God in Christ has done whatever needed to be done in order that men might be freed from the guilt of their sin, and start upon a new life in the strength of divine grace. That is the essence of the matter, and many theological doctrines which we must think alien in their detail from Paul's thought have nevertheless safeguarded for their time the Gospel which he preached.

COROLLARIES OF THE DOCTRINE OF JUSTIFICATION

27
Then what becomes of our boasting ? This passage begins by affirming an important corollary of the doctrine of justification by grace through faith. It is that boasting before God (cf. iv. 2) is absolutely ruled out
Boasting represents the same verb which is used in ii. 17, priding yourself in God; the corresponding noun is used in iv. 2, something to be proud of. It is to Paul's mind a fundamentally irreligious attitude. It finds crude expression in the prayer of the Pharisee in the parable of Luke xviii. 10-14, and the Gospels and Paul agree in representing it as the great danger to which the devout and law-abiding Pharisee was exposed.

Paul himself seems to have been particularly tempted to it. He had an innate pride, fostered no doubt by his peculiar situation as a Roman citizen and at the same time a Jew of the Dispersion ; possessing an assured social position, and yet a member of a despised minority in the society in which he moved. Galled by the sense of inferiority he was made to feel as a Jew, he found compensation in the religious superiority of his race – bearing the name of Jew, relying on the Law, priding himself on God, understanding His will, a guide to the blind, a light to darkened souls, a tutor for the foolish, a teacher of the ignorant, because in the Law he had the embodiment of knowledge and truth – like the Jew whom he satirizes in ii. 17ff. But, unlike him, he strove to be an exceptionally good Jew, immaculate by the standard of legal righteousness (Phil. iii. 6). He was not satisfied with any normal and ordinary achievement; he must excel: I outstripped, he says, many of my own age and race in my special ardour for the ancestral traditions (Gal. i. 14). This temptation to satisfy an innate pride by striving after superiority to others did not altogether leave him when he became a Christian. Other apostles might take pay for their work; he would not: I would die sooner than let anyone deprive me of this, my source of pride (i Cor. ix. 15). [Read the whole context, and read also the tirade of 2 Cor. xi. : (I am mad, he adds, to talk like this.... There is nothing to be gained by this sort of thing.)] It is no wonder that, looking back on his pre-Christian days, he realized that his Pharisaic training, with its insistence on the attainment of righteousness before God by scrupulous observance of the Law, had stimulated this tendency in its worst form. The very ideal of his religious life, he now saw, had been an utterly irreligious attitude of boastful selfconfidence. His conversion meant letting go everything which had fostered this self-confidence : For Christ's sake I have learned to count my former gains a loss; indeed I count anything a loss, compared to the supreme value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord ... possessing no legal righteousness of my own, but the righteousness of faith in Christ, the divine righteousness that rests on faith (Phil. iii 7-9 ; read the whole context). And so, No boasting for me, none except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world (Gal. vi. 14).

This is the experience that lies behind his present insistence that in any really religious life boasting is ruled out absolutely. It never can be excluded where the basal principle of religion is the principle of doing deeds, but only on the principle of faith. Christianity therefore (is the implied argument) is true religion, because we hold that a man is justified by faith apart 28 from deeds of the Law altogether.